British Columbia's salmon

Socked

Another inquiry into vanishing stocks

A MYSTERIOUS decline in the numbers of spawning salmon has become one of the rites of autumn in British Columbia, bringing worries of financial and job losses, threats of extinction and a perplexing lack of answers. This season only 1.7m of the 10.4m sockeye salmon that were forecast to return to the Fraser river in fact made it—a 50-year low. That prompted Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister, to ask Bruce Cohen, a justice of British Columbia's Supreme Court, to hold an inquiry into the causes of the sockeye's decline.

Applause was muted. Four other federal inquiries held over the past three decades have failed to halt the decline. Many British Columbians fear that the province's rich salmon fishery, worth about C$500m ($475m), could disappear like that for Atlantic cod. Of the five species of wild salmon involved, two (pink and chum) remain relatively abundant. But stocks of coho, chinook and sockeye are down by more than 70% since the early 1990s. Chinooks on the Thompson river are officially listed as endangered. Hardest hit are Fraser sockeye, once the most valuable fishery. Two groups of sockeye that spawn in lakes near Vancouver are also listed as endangered.

Scientists and environmentalists agree that the causes of the decline include overfishing and the destruction of spawning habitats. Some also blame unauthorised fishing on the Fraser by First Nations, as Canada's indigenous peoples are called. But the biggest controversy concerns the claim that diseases are being spread from open-pen salmon farms. Many migrating Fraser sockeye (both outbound as young smolts and inbound as mature fish) pass some two-dozen salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago. Studies by local and Norwegian scientists have found that sea lice and other parasites from the fish farms can infect the passing sockeye, reducing their chance of survival. Fraser salmon that take the southern route around Vancouver Island, where there is no gauntlet of fish farms to run, do not display these infections.

This threat has not been investigated by the federal government's fisheries department. Its critics say this is because it suffers from a conflict of interest, since it both promotes salmon farming and is charged with protecting wild salmon. They accuse the department of chronic mismanagement of stocks of wild salmon.

But the alleged threat from salmon farming is not the whole story. Far from the fish farms, Alaska's prized chinook (or king) salmon is also under pressure. Stocks in the Yukon River crashed in the late-1990s and are so low this year that commercial fishing has been banned. Alaska's fisheries officials say climate change is mainly to blame. That is likely to be a factor farther south, too. Many experts say that rising sea temperatures off British Columbia have lowered salmon survival-rates because warm-water predators, such as squid and mackerel, have moved north while plankton, a big food source, is less plentiful.

The last federal inquiry into the province's disappearing salmon, by the parliamentary fisheries committee, produced a report entitled “Here we go again”. Unless he is merely to produce a sequel, Justice Cohen will have to come up with some radical recommendations.